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Monday, January 16, 2012

finding true bromance

Valentine's Day is coming up, so naturally a young dyer's fancy turns to thoughts of ... bromance. At Universal Mama, our theme this month is famous couples, and instead of doing Elizabeth and Mr. Darcy, or Romeo and Juliet, I wanted to do something just a little off-kilter.

Over the past year, I've listened to all of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series (sometimes called the Master and Commander series), read by the marvelous Simon Vance. So when I started thinking about bromance, Jack Aubrey and Stephen Maturin were the first to come to mind.

Meet Aubrey--he is a blend of sea greens and blue, with accents of navy (he's a captain in the Royal Navy) and gold (he's nicknamed Goldilocks, or you can prefer to think of it as a stand-in for prize money if you prefer):

And this is my take on Maturin. He was a bit harder to pin down, but I finally decided on this combination of black, charcoal, dusty and earthy browns, and the pale turquoise of the blue-footed booby, his favorite bird:

I've also recently been rereading the Sherlock Holmes stories and books by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I watched Sherlock: Season One, a fantastic miniseries produced by the BBC, and it sparked my interest in the stories again. I like the BBC's Watson so much more than the one in the stories, who is really rather dim and more of a narrative device than a believable character. BBC Watson doesn't just let Sherlock's condescension pass (or not always, anyway), and his thirst for action makes him the perfect companion. Love this series, can't wait for Season 2 to get to the US.

This is Holmes--a brooding semi-solid of dusky blue and charcoal:

Watson echoes the same blues and greys, but the addition of several shades of brown and silver makes him a little warmer and more approachable:

It surprised me that Watson and Maturin would be somewhat similar. Watson's more like Aubrey--never mind maneuvers, just go straight at 'em. I thought about substituting a different color for the blue-footed booby in Maturin--I might play around with that a bit more.